Enslaved by Ducks (29 page)

“She sure has been a nice goose,” Linda told me sadly, as we settled
into bed. “I sure have enjoyed our time with her. I like it when we’re watching TV and she honks because she wants us to go out and fuss over her.”

“I just hope she isn’t suffering too much,” I said.

In the swamp below the backyard, the last of the spring peepers were singing. Only five or six were still left in the shrinking seasonal pond, and each time a car rumbled past our house, they immediately fell silent only to resume their chirping several seconds later. Ever since moving to the country, I had loved the song of the frogs, and despite my aversion to fresh air, I’d occasionally crack the window open on chilly spring nights to bring their voices closer. But as I lay in bed worrying that Liza was dying, I wondered how I’d feel about the frogs the next time I heard them. Bertha had died at the height of katydid-calling frenzy, and hardly an August night went by when their
zip-zip
song didn’t evoke a memory.

I awoke the next morning with my stomach knotted by dread. Crawling carefully out of bed so as not to disturb Linda, I eased shut the bedroom door and unlocked the door to the porch. I was still twisting the knob and hadn’t even taken my first step outside when Liza was already honking hello. She peppered the air with excited bleats and attacked her scratch feed with gusto when I held the bowl. It took two trips to the front lawn to gather enough dandelion leaves to satisfy her hunger. I was so thrilled that her vitality had returned, I generously waved at a passing motorist who was rude enough to beep his horn at your average everyday pajamaclad man squatting in the grass plucking weeds.

We experienced a few more shaky nights with Liza, when she barely had sufficient strength to breathe, but by the end of the fifth week, she would occasionally succeed in struggling to her feet after soaking up the sun on our front lawn. She even managed a wobbly step or two to great vocal encouragement from her caregivers.
One morning during week six, Linda called me from the bedroom to witness Liza standing proudly at the threshold to the porch all the way across the room from her wading-pool bed. That same afternoon, as the ducks and Hailey fanned out across the backyard while we changed their water, Liza rose from her spot in the warm grass, walked to the front gate, and honked at us to let her join the others.

“Should we let her go?” Linda asked me. “I can’t see what it would hurt.”

“Let her through!”

Few sights would seem to hold less drama than a goose waddling through a garden gate, but to us the occurrence was every bit as monumental as if the Sphinx had climbed down from the Giza plateau and moved into our barn with the turkeys. Walking slowly, Liza honked nonchalantly to Hailey and joined her grazing under the redbud tree. Toucanlady had been correct. The short trip from our front porch to the backyard had turned out to be a long, hard road indeed. Our goose had been so sick for so many weeks, I had never expected her to get better, and I felt overjoyed at her recovery. Liza’s return to health apparently affected her emotionally, too, since she immediately underwent an unusual form of amnesia.

A year and some months earlier, our geese had come to us from their previous owner habituated to human company and not yet in the throes of hormonal changes that would later cement their interests exclusively to members of their small waterfowl society. Gone were the days when I could plop down on the lawn and find a goose in my lap without a favorite food item to tempt her there. After Liza had fallen sick enough that she had lost her ability to walk, however, she placed her care in our hands with unstinting confidence, not merely tolerating but welcoming physical contact with us. The touch of a hand reassured her, and she no more feared
our approach when we walked over to her pool to feed her than would the family dog. But once a healthy Liza strolled back into the pen with her sister, Hailey, and her duck accomplices, all memory of the niceties of human contact fled. The very next day when I let the girls out for a romp around the yard, I headed toward Liza to give her a pat and wish her well. She honked and skittered away as if to say, “What on earth are you doing? What kind of a goose do you take me for?”

“That’s good,” Linda answered. “She’s really back to normal.” And she was right.

From time to time after Liza’s recovery, I would hear the barred owl hooting from our woods. On more than one occasion, it sounded like the owl was calling from the walnut tree on the edge of our backyard, where I had caught it in my flashlight beam on that fateful spring night. “Who cooks for you?” the barred owl inquired. “Who cooks for you all?”

I was tempted to hoot back with my boyish trombone imitation. After all, a summons from such a magnificent and powerful bird was an honor that deserved a reply. But remembering my manners, I restrained myself and muttered to the window instead, “Forget it, owl. What kind of a superstitious fool do you take me for?”

Avoiding pet stores wasn’t enough to keep our animal population from expanding. Neither was snipping the phone line to block requests that we take in yet another winged or long-eared orphan. Occasionally a new animal would literally drop from the sky.

One summer afternoon, Stanley Sue sounded the shrill alarm-call whistle that usually indicated she had spotted a hawk from the dining room window. I peered into the yard and up through the skylight, but didn’t see anything more threatening than a nuthatch, until a tan-and-white pigeon plopped down from our hackberry tree onto the flat roof of the milk house. While pigeons are as common as in-laws in most neighborhoods, they never visited us in the country. A few shy mourning doves pecked the ground under our bird feeders in frigid seasons when natural food was scarce, but we were definitely far removed from pigeon thoroughfares. In an attempt to satiate every bird within a two-mile radius of our house, we usually supplemented the food in our bird feeders by dumping vast quantities of seed on the ground and on the milk-house
roof. Ground-feeding birds such as blue jays, along with finch flocks, attacked the scattered seed with gusto, but with nothing resembling the desperate greed exhibited by the tan-and-white pigeon. Once the bird had eaten its fill, it stayed put even as I grimaced at it though different windows and from different angles, attempting to assess if anything was wrong.

“I think it might be someone’s pet,” Linda concluded. “Maybe it’s a racing pigeon that got knocked off course by a hawk.”

I pooh-poohed the idea even as I considered the possibility that it might be true. Wherever the pigeon had come from, it didn’t demonstrate overt fear of humans—or at least not of me, failing to budge from the roof even after I had unfolded the stepladder next to the shed, clomped quavering to the top, and sat upon the eaves not three feet away from the presumed stray. Reaching out to tweak its beak proved a step too far. The bird flew to the metal strut on the second story of our house that buttressed the chimney of our basement wood furnace. Once I returned to ground level, the pigeon’s love affair with the milk-house roof resumed.

“I think that bird might be someone’s pet,” I explained to Linda patiently.

“She looks like a Tillie,” Linda surmised.

Deciding that the pigeon sought our help, I sent her flapping back to the chimney support by lugging our trusty Humane Live Animal Trap to the top of the milk house and loading it with a virgin pile of scratch feed sweetened with a pinch of the parakeet seed that Howard loved. I watched with Stanley Sue through the dining room window as Tillie dropped down to the roof, paced in front of the open door of the trap bobbing her head with each step, and after a moment of indecision, hopped inside. I worried that she didn’t weigh enough to trip the trigger, but a few seconds later she fluttered her wings in panic as the door snapped shut behind her.

Tillie showed more annoyance than unease as Linda transferred her from the raccoon trap to a cage on the front porch. Less than a month earlier, Liza had abandoned her straw-filled pool to rejoin the backyard ducks, and it seemed natural to once again have a living creature outside the living room to keep the mice and spiders company. Uncertain what sorts of exotic microscopic creatures might be clinging to an apparent bird in distress, I took her to see Dr. Fuller after a few days.

“She does have lice,” he told me, as he began examining her.

“She’s a Birmingham Roller Pigeon,” I blurted out in her defense.

“Son of a gun,” he chuckled politely. My dubious identification was based on three minutes spent with a guide to doves and pigeons at a local remaindered-book outlet. I had wanted to buy the half-priced reference book, but was easily dissuaded by an expansive “Disease and Injury” appendix brimming with color photographs of bizarre growths, pustules, and swollen internal organs.

“She certainly doesn’t look like any wild pigeon I’ve ever seen,” I insisted.

“I don’t know,” he answered gently. “I’ve seen lots of color variation, including all-white birds. But they usually don’t last long in a flock. They stick out like a sore thumb to predators.”

Except for the bloom of lice scheming beneath her feathers, Tillie received a clean bill of health from our vet. Back home on the porch, I was shaking a can of bird insecticide from the pet store until my arm hurt when Linda came out to determine what the moaning was all about.

“Too much exercise,” I complained.

“What are you going to do with that?” she asked.

“Delouse Tillie.”

“Put her somewhere else while you spray her cage.”

“You’re supposed to spray the bird. That’s the whole point.”

“But that’s insecticide.”

“See the label? See the picture of the happy bird on the label? ‘Safe for birds.’ You have to spray the bird to kill the lice. Dr. Fuller recommended this brand.”

“It’s still insecticide,” Linda pointed out. “It will make her sick.”

“‘Safe for birds,’” I repeated. “I’ll spray the cage. But I have to spray her, too.”

“Don’t spray her with insecticide. You’ll make her sick.”

“You’re supposed to spray the bird.”

We went around and around like that until both of us were giddy. Releasing the bird from the cage to flutter around on the porch, I took the cage outside and liberally doused it with the spray. Linda watched, then went back to her business in the house. I chased down the bird, put the bird back inside the cage, and lightly sprayed the bird with insecticide. More of the insecticide dribbled onto my fingers than ended up on either cage or caged bird. I licked my fingers with no ill effects other than a sudden hankering for an arachnid canapé.

The longer we kept Tillie, the stronger she became. She also grew less satisfied with captivity and increasingly intolerant of her captors. For a few days we tried putting her in the dining room with the other birds, thinking that once she had gotten a taste of the pampered life, she would reclaim her identity as a pet bird. The only joy she eked out of perching on a cage top near the ceiling was launching pecks at Howard whenever he landed near her. In the larger free-flight area of the porch, she spent the majority of her time fluttering from window to window in search of a way outdoors. Gradually, we came around to realizing that Tillie was undoubtedly a wild bird after all. Dinner at my sister Joan’s house clinched it when Linda and I studied the sky-darkening flock of pigeons that had descended on her lawn around her bird feeder.
Sprinkled amid the standard-issue blue-grey city pigeon uniforms were pigeons clad in brown, white, and green color mixes.

T
HREE WEEKS HAD
elapsed between Tillie’s capture and the afternoon I took her cage outside and opened the door. “You can leave if you want to,” I told her, hinting that it would be ungrateful to actually fly away. With an energetic chugging of her wings, she rose as high as the second story chimney strut and stayed there. Throughout the remainder of the summer, she stayed close to the yard. She might disappear for hours at a time, but by evening we would always find her roosting on the chimney support as close to the house as possible, for protection against hawks. Sometimes when Linda and I were taking care of the ducks and we left a hose running on the lawn between pens, Tillie would swoop down, grab a drink, then return to the safety of the milk-house roof or our hackberry tree.

A few days after Tillie’s release, Linda ran into Tam and Steve at the Food City supermarket. The couple shared a house even smaller than ours with eight orphaned cats and owned a patch of land overrun at various times with wild turkeys (we had watched a flock from Tam and Steve’s living room window), deer, Canada geese, and raccoons. An industrious muskrat usually busied itself in the pond on the other side of their gravel driveway, while a fat possum they dubbed Electrolux had taken possession of a back corner of their garage.

“A friend of ours has a really nice rabbit in need of a good home,” Tam told Linda. “She’s getting married and moving away, and she can’t bring the rabbit with her.”

“Bob won’t let us have any more rabbits,” Linda said.

“The poor guy sits out in a cage in the barn all by himself.”

Faster than the eye could register it, Linda wrote down the telephone
number of the rabbit owner. As if swept in on a tide of history, I found myself the following Saturday walking into a barn owned by Tam and Steve’s neighbor, Judy. I had spent the morning rehearsing any number of excuses in my mind why we couldn’t possibly take a third male rabbit, but I found myself laughing out loud when I laid eyes on Walter. As soon as he saw us, he hopped into the battered cardboard box that Judy told us was his favorite spot to hide. Hiding didn’t equal concealment, however. He couldn’t quite squeeze his entire body into the shadow of the carton. Compared to Bertie and Rollo, Walter was huge, a Checker Giant mix, tipping the scales at just over eight pounds. Despite the epic proportions of his rump and haunches, his head appeared comically oversize, and his jet-black eyes topped with an exuberant thatch of eyelashes added an irresistible element of pathos.

“He’s beautiful,” Linda beamed.